


All Roads Home

by aileenrose



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Realities, Angst, Drug Use, Family, Happy Ending, Human Castiel, M/M, Parallel Universes, Season 9, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 14:35:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1986606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aileenrose/pseuds/aileenrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was never just one way to save the world. </p><p>Dean, Cas, and Sam battle on together (or apart), face down angels (or don't), and find out that, despite everything that happens, the ending will always be the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Roads Home

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe it's because Cas called at the bus station, or because he didn't.  
> Maybe it's because Sam was possessed by Ezekiel, or Gadreel, or no one at all.  
> Maybe it's because Dean has the Mark of Cain...or maybe it's not. 
> 
> It could be because Crowley's still chained up in the basement. Probably not.
> 
> Warnings for TEMPORARY character death, violence, mild gore.

**Reality One: This Is All He Is Now**

                The sad thing is, they were all so relieved to find each other in the aftermath. Sam made it through the trials, but barely, hanging on to life by his fingernails. The Winchester way. He and Dean escaped a hospital as an angel assault practically overwhelmed it. Angels were looking for them, but only to act as a middleman. What they really wanted was Cas.

                They have intermittent contact with Cas, who calls from a scratchy payphone and immediately starts his confessions. He’s human. He’s only got three dollars and a bottle of water. He’s the reason the angels fell.

                “Get back to the bunker,” Dean interrupts. “We’ll talk there, okay? Be careful—you’ve got some really pissed angels on your tail.”

                Except Cas doesn’t get back to the bunker. Not when he’s supposed to, anyways. Dean spends a few sleepless nights worrying. There’s nothing he can do; Cas is the one without a phone. Cas is the one who has to find a payphone and contact _him_. Finally, Cas calls, his voice weary and miserable. He’s in Kansas, but barely. He’s at a truck stop in Elkhart, it’s raining, will Dean come get him. Please.

                So it’s not like Dean doesn’t have enough to do. The king of Hell is tied up in his basement, Kevin’s freaking out, Sam is sick as a dog. The whole host of Heaven is on Earth, taking or breaking vessels and out for blood. But he drives all night and into the morning to find Cas sitting at a truck stop curb, wiping his dripping nose on a dirty sleeve. He smiles wide and stands up when Dean’s headlights sweep over him.

                They don’t talk much on the way home. In fact, Cas snores against the window for most of the trip, fingers twitching in his sleep. When he wakes, he’s embarrassed.

                “I think—I think we need to pull over at the next stop,” he all but whispers.

                “Why? Gotta take a leak?” Dean says indelicately.

                Cas makes a face but doesn’t deny it.

                When they get back to the bunker, it’s nice. Sam totters out of his bedroom to give Cas an exhausted, one-armed hug. Kevin waves from the table. And Dean—well, Dean takes Cas down a long hallway and throws open a door at random.

                “Bed, lamp, desk. It’s practically the Four Seasons,” he says. Cas walks in, looks around the bare walls, and looks back at Dean in the doorway.

                “It’s very nice,” he says politely, sincerely.

                “Anything else you need tonight?”

                Cas opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t. After a moment he presses his lips together, shaking his head.

                “No? Well, okay then,” Dean says. He raps his fingers on the door. “Yell if you need anything, okay?”

                Cas says he will.

                So who can say when it happens. The next day? Over the course of the next three weeks? The thing is, the Winchesters have never been much for coddling. They’ve never stopped for long. They have never given themselves or others in the business of saving the world much respite. You move on and you move on and then you die. A werewolf tears out your heart. A bullet finds its way into your brain. And no one else stops for very long to watch you go. They move on.

                Dean and Sam are still on that treadmill. Sammy is shaky and prone to being tired, but he drags himself out of bed a day or two after Cas gets there, and he gets to work. He’s got piles of tomes on the table in front of him, looking for a loophole. Metatron might have turned Heaven upside down, pulled its pockets inside-out, but there has to be something he overlooked, right? He keeps the coffee pot brewing and the lamp on, and keeps chugging on.

                Cas, to his benefit, tries. That much is obvious. He’s all smiles and self-deprecation as he throws himself into any task that he or others puts before him. It’s not like the effort goes entirely unappreciated. He just—he doesn’t do some of it particularly well.

                He tries to help Sam with research, but finds—not that he’ll mention it—that his memory is not what he’s used to. He has to riffle back through pages, forgetting what he’s just read. He gets confused, and struggles with the limited capacities of a self that was once limitless in his knowledge. He gets headaches, poring over texts, and when he closes his eyes he still sees lines of text across his vision, scrolling side to side, never ending. He smiles at Sam and suggests that maybe he’d be more useful elsewhere.

                The thing is, he’s trying to be unobtrusive. But Dean doesn’t need his help in the kitchen. He waves him away, saying he’ll take care of it, find something else to do. He tries to practice at the gun range they have in the wing of the basement, and finds he’s not especially skilled. He practices shooting until his fingers cramp up, but he knows he doesn’t have the quick trigger accuracy of a real hunter, like Sam or Dean. He tells himself he’ll learn.

                He tries his hand at laundry, and somehow manages to turn a whole load blue. He falls asleep in broad daylight, standing, and he forgets to eat sometimes and often, at night, finds he can’t sleep, lying awake and burning with ideas, plans for how to prove himself. He tells himself he’ll learn.

                This does not escape Sam and Dean’s attention. It’s the worst punishment there is, seeing his old friends looking at him askance, in disbelief. He tries to work harder, smiling maniacally and apologizing for every mistake, but all he thinks he’s really doing is bumbling around in a circle, horribly inept, with a bright spotlight beaming down on him, cataloging his small, domestic failures.

                The thing is, Dean hadn’t expected this. Cas has been many things in the past—grumpy, sneaky, crazy. He’d still come through when the Winchesters really needed him. But now—now he’s whiffing the ball, right when he needs to step up. He brought down the whole host of Heaven and he can barely wipe his ass, let alone figure out a way to set it right. Dean wants to grab Cas by the shoulders, shake him, bring back the strong and steady Cas that he’s used to. But this is the way Cas is now. Maybe he’ll learn to accept it.

                Or maybe not. News comes in of warring factions of angels, their battles taking place in schoolyards and office buildings and libraries. The vessels are found ruined, eyes still smoking, some of them only children. The pressure is on the Winchesters again to save the world. Meanwhile, Cas almost shoots himself in the face.

                They’d been on a hunt. That’s on their plate, too—dealing with the now-humdrum familiarity of witches, vampires, ghouls, in addition to everything else. Cas had been eager to tag along, and that, too, was grating on Dean. A lot of the things Cas did were starting to grate on Dean.

                There they’d been. Some dark, creaky warehouse with a family of bloodthirsty werewolves somewhere in its depths. Cas had heard the scuffle of an approaching were, and raised his gun—not to shoot just yet, because he didn’t want to alert the other members of its family—and he couldn’t explain what happened next. Someone or something hit his arm, he fumbled with the gun, and the next thing he knew he both felt and saw the blast of the bullet—found himself thrown against the wall, eyes dazed, and still remembering the sudden whistle of the bullet as it shot past his nose, over his head. He thinks it even sheared away some hair.

                Needless to say, the werewolves were alerted.  In the chaos, ears still ringing, he pushed himself away from the wall, only to be thrown back into it, Dean’s hands bunched in his shirt.

                “Are—you— _insane_?” Dean roared in his face, and then he was gone, calmly shooting a screaming werewolf in the face with a murderous expression, and moving on. Cas, still slumped against the wall, decided to stay there.

                Dean strides up to him later—he isn’t really sure how much later—and pokes a finger to his chest, hard .

                “No more hunts for you,” he says harshly. “Damn near blew your own face off. Learn how to handle a gun or don’t come at all.”

                “Dean—”

                “Don’t.”

                It only escalates from there. Dean throws him dirty looks that night, and Cas sees later, in the mirror, the scorched red line that furrows his forehead, from where the bullet came so dangerously close. He rubs his finger over it, hard, then harder, watching it become vivid and angry in the glass. Death escaped by an inch, by a hairs breadth. There are heroic deaths, and then there are deaths of your own stupid making, your finger tagging your own trigger as you flail around. People who save the world don’t have time for those kinds of things.

                Maybe he’s not one of those people anymore.

                The floodgates have broken in Dean . He can’t help it, he’s sick of Cas’s apologetic smiles, the eager way he trips over his feet to help. He’s sick of Cas, faking chipper in the morning, even though the whole bunker has heard his screams during the night, can see the dark shadows beneath his eyes. He’s sick of the way Cas stares at him when he thinks Dean isn’t looking, like he’s desperately trying to figure out a way to please him. And maybe it’s selfish and awful, but Dean wouldn’t be so angry if Cas was the way he was supposed to be.  A soldier. An unmovable force. An unquestionable strength. He could still be that, and be human. Dean isn’t expecting much, he just expected _more_.

                And, of course, there are years of pent-up emotions. They haven’t had the time to hash them out—they still don’t have the time—but it’s so easy for these feelings of righteous anger to billow up, unchecked, when Cas does nothing to stop them. Dean starts making snide comments—about Purgatory, about working with Crowley, about trusting Metatron over the Winchesters. Cas gives him pained smiles and doesn’t answer.

                Sam witnesses the way their relationship becomes tense, hostile, but he doesn’t know how to intervene. Dean and Cas—they’re the ones who have always had a profound bond. He’s used to them sniping and clashing, breaking apart and coming together. He figures it’s a pretty even match-up, like it’s always been. It takes him by surprise when Dean beckons him into the library one day, checking around the corner for any other presence.

                “Have you talked to Cas?” Dean demands.

                “...No?” Sam says. “I mean, we _talk_. You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

                “He’s driving me up the fuckin’ _wall_ ,” Dean says. He runs a hand quickly, frustrated, through his hair. “I mean, I knew  he’d have to adjust to being human, but Jesus. I never asked to be his babysitter.”

                “Come on,” Sam says. He’s used to playing peacemaker, and he does think Dean is being unfair in his treatment (although he does think, even as he tries to be patient, that he’d expected Cas to be different, too. Hadn’t expected him to be quite so limited by his gracelessness.) “He’s your best friend.”

                “Yeah, well, I don’t need best friends right now,” Dean says. “The world’s on the brink again— _his_  doing, by the way—and he couldn’t be more useless. You know what I need? People who can do their fucking jobs.”

                “Dean,” Sam says in a soft voice.

                “—almost shot himself in the face, _Jesus_ —”       

                Unseen, unheard, Cas wheels around in the doorway and fumbles back to his room, numb.

                He doesn’t know why he’s this way, either. Waking up human, that first day, he’d felt something almost like _hope_. Dean was going to help him, Dean and Sam were going to take him in at the bunker. They’d figure out the newest catastrophe together, emerge victorious once again. Team Free Will.

                No one, him included, had counted on him being so useless. There were so many things for him to learn, and it was crunch time, and he wasn’t learning fast enough. So many things, big and little. He couldn’t hack a computer or pick a lock or adequately interview a witness. He couldn’t fly across the world from the sheer force of his will, he couldn’t lift an anvil or wipe out a life by the touch of his hand. There were so many things that human Castiel couldn’t do. He learns that everyday—how many things he never knew, until now, that he couldn’t do.

                He hadn’t been counting on the fact that his mind would be so small, so contained, and that everyday he’d wake up, gasping, already know that he’d lost something. Some millennia of consciousness washed away, and he would never even know it. He hadn’t expected to be tired or hungry or sad. No, he hadn’t expected the great, swamping guilt that he slogged through every day. It had been distant, muted, as an angel, but now he felt it every second,  every minute. Guilt enough to weigh his limbs, make his whole body ache.

                The thing was, he was human, but no one expected him to act like one. Not the Winchesters, and certainly not him, and certainly not _now_.

                _Baby in a trench coat,_ he remembers. _No one cares that you’re broken_. Or maybe, truthfully, _no one cares about you when you’re broken_. Only needed when he’s useful. Only useful when he’s needed.

                He sinks down on his bed. He thinks about Dean’s face—not angry, even. Just frustrated and unable to understand.

                Cas, once able to move mountains and whisk through air and burn a demon into ash, is diminished now. That’s what he is. A shadow of his former self, his might, his usefulness. Diminished. He will have to find a way to accept that.

                He tells himself he’ll learn.

 

**Reality Two: A Burnt-out Shell of a Man**

                Since Sam’s not talking to him, he enlists Charlie’s help.

                It happens providentially, really—he was alone in the bunker, at a loss, and she stumbled through the doorway, fresh from Oz. Now, she’s spinning in an old leather wheelie chair she found in a back closet, her hair fanning out red around her, and is giggling when she catches the wall to stop herself.

                “So,” she says, a little breathless. “Chalk one up to Dead Old Men of Letters having good taste. This chair. It molds perfectly to your butt, and the _support—_ ”

                “Sure,” Dean says. “Look, not to be an asshole, but if you could use the butt-chair and work at the same time, it would much appreciated.”

                Charlie raises her eyebrows, but opens the Mac in her lap anyways.

                “Aye, aye captain,” she says. “What are we looking for?”

                Dean reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a picture, creased from the small confines. Charlie takes it and studies it—it’s of a man, middle-aged, trench-coated, a bird’s eye view. He’s got blood on his face and a rather maniacal smile.

                “Oh-kay,” she says slowly. “Who’s this?”

                “It’s—it’s Cas,” Dean says, fondly, a little helplessly, like the name encompasses all that needs to be said. If he’s good in Dean’s books then he must be good in hers, too, even if he does look like the antagonist in a horror movie.

                Some things start adding up for her. “Oh, like Castiel,” she says. “The angel with the crush on you from the Carver Edlund novels.” Dean doesn’t say anything so she adds, “I wasn’t expecting him to look so…so, uh…”

                “Psychopathic, yeah,” Dean says. “He went a little off the deep end a few years ago.” He waves his hand, dismissing that. Old news. “It’s the only picture I could find of him…”

                It hurts to look at it. He’s glad Charlie’s holding it now. All those years, those times with Cas at his shoulder or in the back seat, he’d never taken a picture. It’s not like Sam and him are taking— _selfies_ , or whatever, either. But when it came down to it, Jimmy Novak had been wiped off the map. Pictures, records, everything—just obliterated from the Internet. Dean had to figure that Castiel could have just snapped his fingers and accomplished this, back when he was an angel, to fulfill his promise of keeping the Novaks safe. Safety through anonymity, but it didn’t help Dean now.

                Emmanuel didn’t work either, but he wasn’t surprised. The healing practice the amnesiac Cas had started had also been rather anonymous, low-key. A grassroots movement of faith, but not good for Dean’s motives, either.

                So he had to settle for what he could find. At the descent of Cas’s powers, as playing God proved to be an erroneous, drastic choice, Cas had snapped. He’d made the news for that, for the horrifying footage of him in the campaigners office, just seconds before he killed everyone in the room—that’s the only picture he had of Cas. It wasn’t the Cas he knew—earnest and loyal and good, sometimes to a fault. But it would have to do.

                “You want me to find him?” Charlie asks.

                “Yeah,” Dean says. He clears his throat. “I don’t know what else to do—I don’t know where else to look.”

                “I’ll see what I can do,” Charlie says, and she swivels around, already tapping on her keyboard. It’s the closest to a promise that Dean’s gonna get. He stares at her head, bent over the laptop, before he stands and leaves the room.

                The guilt. It’s unbearable sometimes. First he wants to know if Cas is alive. That’s the kind of thinking that can keep him up at night. But he also wants to know—is Cas okay? Does he have food and a place to live? Is he happy?

                Dean knows he’s played his cards wrong. It had been an agonizing decision—Cas or Sam. More like—Cas, or the thing possessing Sam. The angel he thought was Ezekiel. God, that was brutal, having to look into Cas’s content, unsuspecting face and tell him that he couldn’t stay. The wounded, confused look hadn’t even been the worst part. It was the quick submission that followed—the immediate acceptance that _of course_ Dean didn’t want him there anymore. Dean, too miserable to tell him why, and Cas, who was too proud to ask. He’d left with straight shoulders and the same ratty hoodie he’d been wearing when they found him in that rusted-out bus under the bridge—hoodie still wet from the washer. He’d refused to wait for the dry cycle. Collected his few belongings and left, resolute. His straight shoulders and his hoodie and a few bottles of water and the prepaid cell.

                He didn’t take the money; Dean noticed it later. He’d crumpled it up to his fist and held it to his mouth, hating his cowardice and the angel possessing Sam and fucking Cas, who was just kicked out of his second home in days, and the only survival method he’d picked up in three days on the streets was apparently the Winchester way of never accepting charity.

                So, yeah. What a fucking mess. Sam, when he was Sam, angry and demanding to know why Cas had left. The cold gleam of an angelic presence in the corner of his eyes, making him reach for a blade in the night when he heard the squeak of floorboards. Deleting draft after draft of apologies and excuses to Cas until finally, weeks in, he caves.

                _You okay?_

He never gets a response. There could be so  many reasons—too angry, too hurt, out of reach. But there could also be infinitely worse ones, too. Cas miserable, homeless, scrounging for food—like Dean had found him in the first place, already looking scruffy and underfed. Cas captured by demons, or Cas captured by angels. Cas dead by the hands of either.

                He calls, late one night, palm sweaty on the phone. It rings and rings interminably, until the cool, robotic voice of the automated message machine kicked on. He doesn’t leave one.

                He doesn’t have a chance to call for a long time after that. His suspicions deepen as the week drag on, and Sam still unhealed, and in his desperation he finds himself listening to the sly voice of Crowley.  The angel is not who he says he is. Crowley doesn’t know _who_ , but he knows it isn’t Ezekiel. A demon can sense such things.  And Crowley will help to cast him out if he’s released in return.

                Of course what does Dean do. Making deals with the devil always seems to work out like that, when Sammy’s on the line. Gadreel—because that is his name, Dean finds out in the end— almost gets away with it, too. Dean doesn’t give into Crowley until it’s almost too late—after the angel is almost through siphoning  Sam’s energy, after killing Kevin. In the end Crowley hounds him out, the devil’s trap is kicked in, and Crowley leaves in a smug snap of fingers. Sam follows behind so fast he probably should have hitched a ride with the King of Hell. He’s furious, betrayed, rightfully upset. He pushes Dean over, out of his way, and slams out of the bunker, the sound echoing.

                So then it’s just Dean and Kevin’s body, who he gives a hunter’s funeral to, numbly, within the day. Then it’s just Dean and his alcohol and two demons vying for possession of Hell and a legion of angry angels swarming the Earth and one nasty bitch of a Mark of Cain and Sam away, barely maintaining frosty contact as they try to keep the world from tipping under. But even that frosty contact is better than the complete silence he gets from Cas.

                It’s been months. He’s tried the familiar hunter channels, tried to reason out what Cas would do after walking from a bunker in the middle of nowhere with not one person to go to, and not a dollar on him. The guilt roils through him yet again, for doing that to his newly-human friend, for taking Gadreel’s words over the safety of his staunchest advocate. It doesn’t help. Cas remains  unfound.

                He tries not to get his hopes up. He knows Charlie’s prodigious skills, knows she has better resources than he does, but he can’t put too much faith in them. Not yet. Maybe Cas doesn’t want to be found, not when the only family he thought he had left turned against him.

                And maybe Cas isn’t alive to be found anymore, either—but he doesn’t want to dwell on that.

**

                It’s a full three days later that Charlie emerges from the room she’s taken over in the bunker, victorious.

                “I think I’ve found him,” she says. She looks pleased—and why shouldn’t she be, with the fruits of her labor kicking in after four days—but there’s a strange edge to her tone that makes Dean cautious.

                “He’s okay?” It’s the most important thing in the world, then.

                “Yeah, yeah, I think so,” she says.

                “Where is he?”

                “Illinois,” she answers. “Chicago.”

                Dean collapses into a chair. “How’d you do it?”

                Charlie beams. “Big Brother has cameras everywhere, you know. I had friends across the country hack the traffic cameras in their regions and compile the feeds together. Then I set up a facial recognition progr—you know what, you don’t need to know. All you need to know is, after a few false matches, I got a ping yesterday from a traffic camera in downtown Chicago. It was him.”

                Dean’s glad he’s sitting down, trying to process all of this. After all his fears—Cas is alive. He’s okay. He’s in Chicago. He can work with that.

                “Dean,” Charlie says. She bites her lip. “Are you gonna try to go see him?”

                “Yeah, why?”

                Charlie reaches across the table and lays a hand over his. “You should probably know…he looks different.”

                “Different? Different how?” He’s impatient, spontaneous, wanting to act—all traits that have only been enhanced since he received the Mark.

                Charlie pauses, and pats his hand. If Dean’s brain hadn’t been zooming forward, planning a quick road trip and calculating mileage and a reunion, he probably would have parsed out the meaning in that, her halting, unsure attempt to warn him, the sympathy. “Like he’s changed,” she finally says.

**

                He reaches Chicago the next day.

                It had been easy, once Castiel had been pinned on the map, to follow his progress through traffic cameras. Charlie had done it, late at night while Dean was packing, and came in to tell him that he’d first been sighted exiting a convenience store, and from there she had picked him up on block after block, until finally the camera had recorded the most important thing of all—the building he walked into. The home he had now.

                Dean had snatched the address from her hand, gave her a quick, hard hug, and was out the door within minutes afterwards, thrumming in anticipation. Seeing Cas. For a while there he’d been afraid it would never happen again.

                But, once in Chicago, he finds himself wondering if Charlie made a mistake. The building he pulls up to is an old, ugly apartment building in a seedy area. There’s a condemned house sitting on either side of the building, like bookends, and the broken windows he sees a few stories up remind him of jagged teeth.

                He’s not too thrilled about leaving his car parked on the street there, but has little choice. He walks into Cas’s building and immediately wrinkles his nose at the smell of something he’d rather not name. The carpet is dingy in here, faded, and there are people sleeping in the hallway here, folded into sleeping bags or baggy clothes. Too many people, too little room—Dean’s stomach seems to hollow as he understands that Cas, while presumably living here, might not have a home, after all. Shacking up in a condemned apartment building, squatting until the police come to air them all out like dirty laundry. It’s not a life he would want for anyone, and especially for Cas.

                He tries to ask around for the ex-angel, but only gets stares and distrustful looks at the names he provides—Jimmy, Emmanuel. Surely Cas wouldn’t be going by his _own_ name, not when he had the forces of Heaven and Hell out for his blood. He finds an older woman, slumped against a doorframe, and asks for Cas. To this name, he finally gets a response. She nods and points upstairs.

                Dean goes upstairs, jolting with suspended energy. He’s gonna hug Cas, he decides, and then slap him upside the head for being stupid enough for using his own, angelic name here or anywhere else. He shouldn’t be sharing it with anyone besides the Winchesters and their allies. He’ll do that and then he’ll get Cas the hell out. They’ll go home.

                The person in the closest sleeping bag, there in the hallway, is sleeping, so Dean raps on the first door he finds and asks the suspicious, silent man who answers if he knows Cas. The man points to the wall, to the room next to him, and quickly shuts the door.

                Dean knocks on this door, now, heart tripping in his chest. _Cas, Cas, Cas_.

                No one answers, so he twists the handle, pushes the door open—it gives easily under his newfound strength, even if the door is locked. There’s a mattress on the floor there, bare, pushed in front of one of the windows. There’s also a man, with greasy long hair and a ragged growth of beard. He’s sitting with his thin back facing Dean, shirtless, so that Dean can see the shocking gauntness of him, the shoulder blades as delicate as the wings of a bird.

                The man looks up from where he’s tying off his arm. He doesn’t look particularly surprised to see Dean. He doesn’t look particularly pleased, either.

                “Hello, Dean,” Cas says.         

 

**Reality One: Those Who Are Left Behind**

                Things continue to not be better.

                Cas, once so eager and underfoot, has toned it down. He’s scarcely in the kitchen anymore, wolfing down his food with shy, awkward compliments. He’s scarcely in the library, carrying stacks of books to the table in a half-crazed manner, trying to help Sam and Kevin. It’s hard to find him at all unless you know where to look.

                Dean knows, after careful investigation. Cas will spend hours in the basement, training. He shoots guns at the range with a focused, tireless perseverance. When he hits the target, when he comes nowhere close, his face doesn’t change. He wraps his knuckles and goes at the boxing bag hanging from the ceiling until his back is soaked in perspiration. He leaves the bunker early, before even Sam used to get up back when he was at full health, to go jogging along the deserted road.

                Dean tries to crack a lame joke about a _Rocky_ montage, but Cas doesn’t understand it and doesn’t care to. 

                Everything should be okay, then. Cas is working hard to understand the give and limits of his human body. That dedication, that single-mindedness, is appreciated. By helping himself, he’s helping everyone else out, too.

                Dean, feeling bad for riding him so hard, interrupts a training session to invite him to watch a movie. Kevin and him had vetoed Sam’s choice, banding together in a common love for _Star Wars_. Cas should give himself a break and come watch.

                “No, thank you,” Cas says.

                Dean shifts, watching the dull repetition of Cas’s punches against the bag, over and over and over. Efficient, thorough, unyielding.

“What are you gearing up for?” Dean asks him.

                “I’m just doing my job,” Cas says. There’s nothing rude by his tone or delivery—he’s in fact quite polite. But the words nag Dean, like he’s heard them before.

                So maybe the tension and hostility have lessened, in the aftermath after Cas’s fuck-up at the hunt. That’s good. But Dean can’t help from feeling uneasy, watching Cas revert back to the emotionless, duty-driven machine that had first rescued him from Hell. He doesn’t know when this change occurred in Cas, but he feels partially responsible. He’d been ragging on Cas for so long, because in the current climate he couldn’t deal with Cas’s awkward humanity, his fumbling attempts at help, his _smiling_. Getting what you want can be a bitch sometimes. Now that’s all gone, with Cas returning to the tried and true method. No more eager explorations of humanity, trying to learn and grow and settle into his skin. He’s returned to what he knows—being a soldier.

                He struggles with it until he realizes he has more important things to deal with. Cas can learn to fingerpaint and play the ukulele later. Right now, being a soldier is exactly what they need. Dean’s busy being a soldier, too.

                Cas hasn’t just been training, though. At nights, when he eats, he’ll take the Winchester’s laptop and figures out how to find the news reports. It’s penance in its own way, reading up on the deaths of his brothers and sisters, although of course the news posits these things as random, human acts of violence. Such things happen, certainly explainable due to the uptick of the heat index or chemicals in foods or the ease of obtaining a gun. Cas, though, is in the miserable state of knowing better. Such things happen because he, a naïve former angel, had emptied the infinite expanses of a joyful heaven into the limitless chaos of modern Earth. Angels became corrupted when they were touched by free will, he knows—he led that charge. But now they were being tempted by much more than that.

                Sam finds out about an ensuing faction war to happen within days, in some farming town in rural Missouri. These angels have learned, as Cas has, their tenuous ways around the Internet. Sam thinks they’re using messages in the comments as ways of challenging each other, calling each other out—it makes more sense than broadcasting every tactic over angel radio.

                He beckons Dean and Kevin over and shows them the comments section in the news article of yet another angel bloodbath.

                _I weep for the next generation._

_Yeah but this is big government at work. Boohoo crying but GUNS didnt kill these people….CRAZY PEOPLE WITH GUNS do!!!_

_ >Uhhhh but there are no proof that these ppl were shot. I canz read?? Article says the deaths are “unexplained”._

_ >> ILLUMINATI!_

“Really sifting through the dregs of humanity,” Dean says.

                “Yeah, but check this out,” Sam says. His mouse hovers over a new comment at the bottom of the feed, made within the past few hours.

                _Those that were foolish enough to kill my followers in Fredericksburg should take warning. Those that are reevaluating the poor choices they’ve made—I will be in Grandin, Missouri accepting the most loyal. We will rise again to Heaven in power, and we will overthrow Metatron and his traitorous disciple Castiel. –B_

_ >I will be there, brother. But I come with my own followers. Take heed, everything you say must be done, but the leader who restores us to our rightful places will not be you. –M_

_ >>I TOLD YOU ILLUMINATI?!!!?!_

_“_ Angels think they’re so much better than humans, but they’re just the same,” Kevin remarks. “Internet flame wars—they’re basically having a dick measuring contest.”

                “Yeah, well, we’ve got to get into the middle of that and break it up,” Dean says. “We don’t need these leaders starting an angel genocide on Earth.”

                Sam looks up from the screen. “So we’re—what? Gonna walk into the middle of this and demand everyone to zip up and go home?”

                “Yeah, I guess so,” Dean says. “I don’t know. But this can’t keep happening. If these pricks have their way, we’re gonna have some serious angel armies running across America, mowing each other down. There’s gonna be a lot of casualties if that starts up.”

                “If what starts up?”

                That’s Cas, emerging from the basement like a nocturnal creature. He must have expected everyone to be asleep now—sometimes Kevin sees him passing through into the kitchen, padding on silent feet, and they’ll give each other quick,  wordless nods as they go about their business. Neither of them have much to say to each other, nothing similar between them except for the fact that they’ve been brought into the exclusive, deadly Winchester circle by powers beyond their control. That, and that perhaps, maybe, neither of them feel like they truly belong here yet. Just a temporary layover.

                Dean straightens up from looking over Sam’s shoulder. “Nothing. We’ve got some angel pest control we have to take care of.”    

                He claps Sam on the shoulder. “You ready?”

                Sam hasn’t been in top form since the trials, not that he’d willingly admit it. No, he’s not particularly eager to try to somehow throw a wrench in the bloodthirst between at least two angel factions. But his willingness has nothing to do with it. Just whether he _can_ or not.

                “Yeah, I’m ready,” he says. He closes the laptop and pushes it away from him, across the table. “I’ll go get a bag packed.”

                “I’ll get one too,” Cas says, turning to follow Sam.

                “Cas.”

                Kevin gets up from the table too, beating a hasty retreat after Sam. He’s seen enough of their fights, the whole unstoppable force meets an immovable object, to stick around for the outcome.

                Cas turns to look at Dean, his shoulders rigid. “What?”

                “You can’t—” Dean says. “Come on. It’s _angels_. You’re not coming with us.”

                Cas levels him with a look. “Yes. Angels. That’s exactly why I should come.”

                “I don’t know if you remember—bullet, brain, sheer dumb luck?” Dean comes closer and crowds Cas out of the doorway. “It’s not worth it, and it’s no good bringing you on this hunt, anyways. Those angels are out for your blood.”

                So there’s that. Problem solved. Except as he swings into his bedroom, grabbing the duffel he keeps packed for sudden hunts, Cas is there in the doorway again, blocking him. His face is set with his resolve.

                “I’ve been training,” he says lowly. “I won’t get in the way. Dean, I need to go with you. I need you to trust me. I can do this.”

                “I’m not saying you wouldn’t be able to,” Dean says. “I’m saying you can’t. It’s too dangerous. Look, man, it’s not a big deal. Watch some TV. Nerd out with Kevin. I don’t care. But you’re not coming.”

                Ca s doesn’t say anything—he’s not used to begging, not used to being in the position to. But he follows Dean down the hallway, hot on his heels, and Dean can’t shake him as he climbs the stairs to leave the bunker. Sam is standing there, leaning against the passenger door, but when he sees the two come bursting out the front door he quickly slides into the unlocked Impala.

                Dean opens the driver’s side door and just as quickly hits the lock button, right as Cas is reaching for the door handle.

                “Cas, dammit, _stop_ ,” he says. “Go inside, get over it.”

                “Dean,” Cas says. His lips barely move. “Please.”

                Dean turns away from him, from the intensity in his eyes. He gets in and firmly closes the door behind him. They all look at each other—Dean and Sam inside the Impala (Sam with a sympathetic expression) and Cas standing outside. His face is expressionless as Dean puts the car into gear and crunches through the gravel on the verge of the road.

                “There’s no fucking way,” Dean says to Sam. “With Metatron locked away, he’s first on their black list. Undesirable Number One. They’re all out to rip him to shreds.”

                “Yeah.”

                “He’s a big boy,” Dean says, trying to shake the uneasy feeling as he watches Cas’s unmoving figure scroll away in the rearview. “He’ll be fine.”

                Still standing in a small cloud of exhaust, Cas watches the Winchesters leave him standing alone, unneeded baggage on the side of the road.

                The useless get left behind.

 

**Reality Three: In the Hours In-Between**

                Dean still remembers that night, especially now, since the times he’s heard from Cas since then are few and far between.

                It was after finding him at the Gas-N-Sip, after the disastrous babysitting attempt, the encounter with the Rit Zien.  Cas had seemed on edge, unwilling to tell Dean where he lived and end their visit—and Dean didn’t especially want their time together to end, either.

                It’s not like they did much. They drove around Rexford, Idaho, taking in the few sites there were to see. Dean thought Cas would tell him more about the history, the people, maybe the places he likes to frequent. The Cas he’d encountered at the Gas-N-Sip had seemed at peace with his new life, even proud. He assumed that extended to every area of his life.

                Cas, however,  remains silent in the car. Dean is disappointed but waits, instead, for Cas to point out  a street sign or an apartment building, anything to indicate a place, an end of the line. When Cas does speak, it’s something unexpected.

                “It wasn’t a date,” he says. Dean looks over, surprised, but Cas is looking down at his hand, bulky with bandages. “She just wanted me there to watch Tanya.”

                “That sucks,” Dean says. “Do you like her?”

                “Of course,” Cas says, a little petulantly. “She’s a good boss.”

                “No—I meant, do you _like_ her? Romantically?”

                Cas looks up from his hands. “I don’t know,” he says. “It just seemed like the—normal thing to do. The human thing, going out on dates.”

                “Well,” Dean says after a minute. “I’m here tonight, okay? You’ll have time for dates later. I’m sure people are clamoring all over you anyways—with that blue _vest_ and those upbeat lottery ticket sales.”

                “Do you think so?” Cas says. He sounds distant.

                “Sure,” Dean says. “Anyways, I’m here. Any diners open this late?”

                So Cas directs him to a roadside diner open until 2 AM, and they enjoy harmless talking and menus that stick to the table and loaded waffles. They are careful with what they talk about. Cas talks about his regular customers, the time that a young boy in a mask tried to rob the store but dropped the gun as he fumbled it out of his pocket. He talks about figuring out electric razor and finding out what _Kardashians_ were. Dean, in return, tells him how Sam’s recovering from his trials, how he’s put an old, boxy TV in the kitchen so he can practice cooking along to the Food Network.

                Surely Cas is struggling with deeper aspects of humanity than how to operate an electric razor. But they don’t bring that up, because Cas is dealing with that stuff alone—because Cas was kicked out of the bunker. And Dean, in turn, doesn’t tell him about the angel, Ezekiel, who’s possessing his brother, repairing him from the inside out. He doesn’t tell Cas that there’s still a room for him at home, and everything’s ready and waiting for them there as soon as Sam is well enough.

                By the time they’re finished with their meals, it’s almost two in the morning, and Cas still hasn’t made any indication as to where he’d like to be dropped off.

                “So,” Dean says smoothly. “Where do you want—you know what? I’m not so tired. I don’t know about you, but I could stand to watch some late night TV. You in or what?”

                Cas smiles at him from the passenger seat. “Yes, Dean,” he says. “I’m in.”

                Dean’s heart shouldn’t have felt like it was ballooning in his chest, just because he was about to watch _Maury_ in his boxers with his best friend. But it did.

                Cas notices the excited tension from Dean, but doesn’t comment on it. He’s excited too—and maybe for not all the same reasons, because one of them is the pride of not admitting to Dean that he has no place to go, and he didn’t want to tell Dean to take him back to the Gas-N-Sip for the night, so he could shiver in the small supply closet—but he does have other reasons. And another important one, for him, is that humanity is meant to be shared in the way that being an angel never was. Humanity at its most potent, he feels, would be being close to Dean and his laughter and his jokes that Cas doesn’t always understand. In him are all the wonderful passions that made humanity worth saving in the first place.

                When they reach Dean’s motel room, Dean immediately starts rummaging through his duffel bag, pulling out some clothes to sleep in.

                “You want anything?” He says. He has an extra t-shirt, if Cas would want to wear it. The silk-screened band name across the front is all but faded away, it has growing holes in its hem and a stretched-out collar. So he’s disappointed when Cas shakes his head no and sits down, a little formally, on the side of the bed.

                “You could at least undo one more button,” Dean says, going for a lame joke. “Get comfortable.”

                He didn’t expect Cas to frown down at his shirt and undo another button, clumsy with his bandaged hand, and then another one, just for the hell of it, but suddenly his whole friggin’ collarbone is exposed, not to mention a pretty vivid sneak peek of the tanned planes of his chest.

                “I suppose this is more comfortable,” Cas says, still looking down at his shirt.

                “Yeah, it’s great,” Dean babbles. “I’m gonna go—” He ducks into the bathroom to change, self-consciously. When he comes out, clad in a worn t-shirt and his boxers, Cas is already clicking through channels.

                “See anything you like?”

                “I don’t watch TV very often,” Cas says. It isn’t completely true—the Gas-N-Sip does have a television, although it’s normally tuned into a news station and besides, when Cas sleeps there at night, it would look suspicious for the TV to be on in the otherwise-darkened building. He normally just goes about his business of unrolling his sleeping bag, checking his phone in vain for any messages or calls, and then setting an alarm to wake up early before Nora comes.

                But no, he doesn’t watch TV very often.

                Dean slumps down on the bed next to him, which makes the mattress squeak horrendously, and snatches the remote from his hands.

                “Leave it up to me,” he says. He climbs up to the headboard—more squeaking—and settles back against the pillows. After a few silent minutes of clicking through channels, he stops victoriously on a _Maury_ rerun.

                “Take note that when we save the world, we’re saving people like _this_ ,” he says. “Hey, budge up, would you? You’re blocking my view.”

                Cas isn’t, really, but he looks around with deliberation before crawling up to the other mound of pillows and leaning back against the headboard next to Dean. He looks over at Dean, as if for permission, but Dean pretends to be really invested in the Taco Bell commercial on the screen, way too aware of the man in the half-buttoned shirt and fingers still sticky with maple syrup who’s sitting next to him.

                Dean isn’t sure how long they lay there next to one another, at first with bodies that are tense, that later become boneless. He doesn’t think either of them are really watching. He knows he’s more attuned to listening to Cas crack the crick in his neck, to slow breaths that he never seemed to notice in Cas the angel, but are now so essential, worth counting, in Cas as he is now.

                “Dean,” Cas says. His voice is slow. “I think I might be falling asleep.”

                “That’s okay,” he says. Half-whispers. “Don’t worry about it.”

                So Cas falls asleep, and Dean does too.

                Later, he wakes up to a commercial for a hair regrowth product, and in the flashing lights made by the TV in the dark room, he can see Cas sleeping on the pillows next to him, the curve of his eyelashes on his cheek, the shirt that’s become twisted up, exposing the skin of his hip.

                Angels don’t sleep. They don’t look vulnerable or childlike, they don’t snore loudly into pillows, making it easy for someone to enter or leave the room undetected. But Gas-N-Sip attendants do, those humans that are on their feet since 6 AM, wiping down Slushie machines and restocking shelves. All people do, and so does Cas, who makes a living serving other people, the dignity that comes from a job no one else would want to do, while he waits for a sign that he can come home.

                Angels don’t sleep, and hunters don’t often. But Dean remembers fondly a night where they were both human, both together, sleeping with their faces turned towards each other, all their griefs and grudges suspended for a few hours of peace.

**

                There isn’t much more to add to that memory, other than they woke up the next morning and resumed their normal life. Cas buttoned up his shirt, and Dean put on his flannel, and then Cas was driven to the gas station for his scheduled shift. Cas didn’t tell Dean about sleeping on a supply room floor, and Dean didn’t tell Cas about Ezekiel, but something had shifted. Not so big as a seismic shift, not so drastic to change the course of the world—which has happened before, when something has broken between them. But Dean didn’t feel quite so guilty when he left, and Cas decided he was done being bitter.

                In the aftermath, Sam is healed, and Ezekiel takes over one last time to inform Dean of this fact, and then to go on his way. Dean is grateful but also relieved, too, that the angel is gone. Sam doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss, other than to celebrate his return to full health. He starts jogging early in the morning again. Dean decides not to tell him.

                He does, however, want to tell Cas. But Cas doesn’t answer when he calls. He chalks it up to busy days at the Gas-N-Sip, but he doesn’t answer later that day either, or the next day, or even when he texts.

                He knows it’s been months, and their communications have been spotty at best. Distance has only increased their need to talk in person, to work all these differences out face to face. Even so, Cas has always been available on the prepaid cell Dean had given him.

                He’s not sure yet if it’s worth a drive to Idaho—Cas all but ignored him before Dean went to Rexford the first time, and Dean hadn’t deserved Cas’s cooperation after kicking him out with no explanation, but _God,_ had he wanted it.  So he gives it time, because Cas has been silent and still okay in the past, but after four days without an answer he starts to get nervous. He calls again one morning, and finally, _finally_ , someone answers. It’s just not Cas.

                “Uh, hello?”

                “Where’s Ca—Steve?” Dean demands. “This is his phone.”

                “I don’t know,” the person replies. Dean takes a moment to place the voice—it’s Nora, Cas’s boss and one-time date. “I heard a vibrating noise coming from the supply closet and found this phone hidden behind the toilet cleaner. This is Steve’s phone?”

                “Yeah,” Dean says. “Have you seen him? I really need to talk to him.” He really needs to tell Cas that he can come home.

                There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. “Steve hasn’t come into work in three days,” Nora replies. She sounds upset. “I think he’s gone missing.”

 

**Reality Two: A Journey Full-Circle**

                If someone were to ask Dean how hellish the end of the world was, he’d have to ask, _which time_.

                But the bare bones of the fact is that he remembers one end of the world best, the one that sticks in the corners of his mind because it could have happened, but it didn’t.

                An end of the world that was hopeless, broken, and beyond anything that even God himself could right. He couldn’t figure out which was the worst—the horror of the Croatoan virus? Sam dead, and Lucifer turning on the ocupado sign from within? He himself, forced by fate and circumstance to be someone heartless, emotionless, willing to put his friends to death if it meant victory? Or was it Cas, his best friend, without help or hope, taking anything he could to dull the pain of humanity?

                All of the above, maybe, and the memories of that strange trip had lived on, nightmarish in quality. But he had at least had the relief of knowing those sad, damaged people in that future—they were not meant to be. They wouldn’t have to go down those paths anymore.

                So it’s an understatement, then, to say that he’s shocked by the person he sees here in this dirty, bare room, this shadow of man who looks enough like Cas and speaks enough like Cas that it must be him, even if Dean doesn’t especially want him to be.

                He tears his eyes away from Cas, trying to make sense of a roadblock he hadn’t seen coming. He feels a prickle of anger running through his arm, his blood, thinking of Charlie not warning him—but quashes it. Charlie probably didn’t know how to warn him—that this angel, one of the heroes from Carver Edlund’s books, had turned into _this._

His gaze snags on the burnt spoon lying on the bed in front of Cas, carelessly left in a patch of sunlight coming in from the grimy window. There’s a few needles,  looking as shiny and sharp as an angel blade, littered around the bed. The rising disgust makes him look away again—like he found Cas in the middle of an awful crime scene, even though Cas is very much alive and wary here in front of him.

                Dean hears the rustle of cloth, and looks up in time to see Cas standing on the mattress, pulling a thin, long-sleeved shirt over his head. He pulls the sleeves down, jerkily, over his forearms, down to his wrists. It’s only then he looks up at Dean and, unexplainably  smiles.

                “Gonna stand there all day?” It’s soft, but there’s acid in his tone.

                So Dean closes the door behind him and, at a loss, looks across the small room at Cas. Cas sits on the edge of the mattress, hanging thin wrists down over thin knees.

                “Hello, Dean, how are you,” he says, in the same dull way that a person hosting a dinner party might say it, repeating it again and again to each new guest through the door.

                “I’m okay, Cas,” Dean says. He clears his throat. “I’ve been better.”

                “Hmm,” Cas says. “What brings you to charming Chicago, Dean? If you wanted the Four Seasons, I’m afraid you have the wrong neighborhood.”

                Dean knew that, at some point, he’d be explaining the whole mess to Cas. The guy deserved to know why Cas had thrown him to the wolves within hours of protecting him from them in the first place. But Dean, maybe selfishly, had thought their reunion, after so many months apart, would be different. Maybe awkward, maybe strained, but he had thought they’d hug, a quick clap on each other’s shoulders, the sweet relief of an awaited reunion.  They would talk, explain themselves, and Cas would come home. Come home with Dean. Dean wouldn’t even have to say it, or have to ask, because Cas would know—the door was open to him now, to a place where he belonged, and it would never be closed again. But it seems he had been envisioning these reunions with a different animal, a wholly different Cas.

                Cas’s eyes are bright with a bitter challenge when he locks his gaze with Dean’s. Dean isn’t ready, doesn’t want to have this conversation just yet, but it seems he doesn’t have this choice. Cas is gonna make him say it.

                “I came because I wanted to ask you,” Dean says, squaring his shoulders. “Come home, Cas. Stay with me.”

                Cas just laughs at him, his fingers rasping into his skin as he scratches at his arm.

                “That’s funny,” he says. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear that.”

                It’s true. He fantasized about it months ago, trudging away from the bunker,  light from its open door throwing his shadow forward—he thought that Dean, standing in the doorway wordlessly, would break his silence at any time. Run after him, explain the sudden dismissal, bring him into the warmth of his home again. But Dean didn’t—Dean had let him go, and worse, hadn’t told him why.

                He wishes for it when he’s waiting at bus stops for rides to nowhere, just wanting to keep moving. He thinks about it in the lines for homeless shelters, hoping there’s still a bed for him—he’d sleep on the floor, in a corner, he just doesn’t want to be on the street anymore. He imagines that every time he takes the prepaid cell phone out of his pocket, there will be a missed call from a number he knows by heart. Dean will leave a voicemail, and he’ll finally explain the reason why he was sent away without a word of kindness, like he was the draft that no one wanted to come in their door. All he wants is for someone to explain _why_ to him. He doesn’t understand so  much of being human, of how to make his way in the world as it is now, but the only answer he wants is one that Dean can give him.

                But it doesn’t come at homeless shelters or rest stops. It doesn’t come when he’s prodded off the park bench he’s sleeping on, it doesn’t come while he slumps in stoops or under bridges or when the angels come for him. It doesn’t come until that night when the man huddled around the trashcan fire with him passes him a syringe and tells him it will take the edge off, just for a little while. It’s not until after that, riding the whirling ecstasy of his first rush, that he hears from Dean.

                He throws his phone, still ringing, into the waters of Lake Huron.

                Cas stopped wanting those words a long time ago, even if he never stopped waiting for them.

                Dean gives him a tentative smile; it looks more like a grimace. He must be disappointed by the human Cas that he found. Well, join the club.

                “I know it was a long time coming,” he says. “I’m—I had to find you first. I lost contact with you.”

                _I lost you_ , is what he means. Did he not think there might have been something purposeful about that?

                “It’s the thought that counts,” Cas mumbles. He’s suddenly very tired of this—Dean, in his bedroom, looming over him. Pinned under a  microscope, diminished. He’s tired of Dean and he’s tired of this bedroom and he’s tired of everything, he’s tired of _life_ , and the thought is so dramatic and self-pitying that he finds himself giggling.

                “What?” Dean asks. It’s a genuine question—he doesn’t know what to expect from Cas.

                “Nothing,” Cas says. He rolls up his sleeve, fingers scritching faster over his skin, the smallest relief. “No, never mind. What we’re you thinking you’d accomplish by coming here? Really.”

                “I told you,” Dean says, faltering and unsure. It’s something that Cas relishes in. “ Cas, please, will you come—“

                “No,” he says. He abruptly stands up, staggering a little to get his bearings, and it’s like his annoyance is something deep beneath his skin, a scratch he can’t reach, and his nails dig harder his skin, ruthless. He smiles at Dean—a hard, sharp thing. “Maybe five months ago. Maybe four. But you—you think you can come in here, after all this time, and just—just—”

                “Cas.”

                “ _No._ You pushed me out, Dean, when I wasn’t worth it to you anymore. No explanation, no reason. And then you track me down and expect me to come back with you, some good little soldier?”

                “There is a reason,” Dean says quickly. “I know you’re mad, Cas, I would be too—Sam, it wasn’t Ezekiel inside of him—”

                Cas lets out a wild laugh. “You think I care about your reasons anymore?” He says. Scratch, scratch—his skin is cheese in a grater, and Dean’s face is confused and young, and he thinks if he tears off this itchy, confining skin, if he rips through it and casts it aside, he’ll emit the purest light from all his pores and glow and expand and fill the room, taller than a skyscraper—

                “The time for following you to the ends of the earth for no reasons, your deadly obedient dog—you missed your window. I waited for you—for just a word, for a single text, telling me you’d forgiven me for whatever I’d done wrong. But you left me—left me all alone.”

                “Cas,” Dean says in a soft voice. It’s the voices that officers use to talk down a person standing on the edge of a bridge—every letter weighted in pacification, restraint. “I’m sorry. I fucked it up, Cas, but please—hear me out. I need you.”

                Cas has heard that before. It’s one phrase in ladder of Winchester one-liners, thrown out carelessly to those desperate enough to gobble it up for sustenance.

                _IneedyouI’mnotleavingherewithoutyouneverdothatagainyousonofabitch._ What did Dean want from him now, from the person he’d become?

                _I’dratherhaveyoucursedornottalktomeyoustupidsonofabitch._

                “I want you to go,” Cas says. He drops his hands. “And don’t come back—I don’t’ want to see you. I don’t know what you’re expecting me to do, but I can’t do it anymore. I’m not the same, I—who I am now, I became this with nothing from you.”

                “And now you want nothing to do with me,” Dean says. He lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Fine. Don’t come back with me, but at least let me set you up somewhere—”

                “I’m fine where I am,” Cas says. Now that Cas is herding him to the door, Dean can see his reddened eyes, his skin scratched and bloody. It’s frightening, how not-fine he is.

                He throws his arm out in the doorway, preventing Cas from pushing him out. “Wait,” he says, ignoring Cas’s affronted, angry expression. “Cas, wait. You can’t keep doing this, the drugs—you’ll kill yourself.”

                The indignation drops away, replaced with something smug. “Dean,” Cas says condescendingly. “I have been alive for so long that the first ancestor in your line appears in the same blink of an eye as you. I have outlived the dinosaurs and the first protozoa and the very Earth itself; I was created along with the sun and the stars, when the galaxy was so young I could still graze its edges with my wings.” He pauses a moment for emphasis. “You don’t think I know what I’m doing to myself?”

                The urge to grab Cas, to violently shake sense into him, is overwhelming. With the Mark pulsing on his arm, Dean can feel his fingers sinking into the wood, gouging grainy holes.

                “Cas, what the hell happened to you?” He demands.

                “Life,” Cas says. He shuts the door in Dean’s face.

 

**Reality One: The Long Arm**

                Cas has learned his way around the Internet. Even if he hadn’t, the Winchesters didn’t work very hard to conceal where they were going. Sam’s laptop is still on the table, and when he opens it, it immediately reboots to the site they were just on.

                He finds himself reading the comments his brothers have made, a sour pit in his stomach. The _B_ he can guess—Bartholomew. Power-hungry, confident, and eager to ease any rocky progress with the blood of angels. The _M_ he isn’t sure of, but it doesn’t matter now. All he knows is that Sam and Dean are heading to Grandin, right into a nest of angels. Right into the middle of a faction war.

                The fact that there’s no address, beyond the mention of Grandin, doesn’t bother him. Some small town in Missouri—he can only guess that Bartholomew has stuffed what little population the town affords with angels. Every man, woman, or child within city limits, filled with grace. It would make it easier to pick out newcomers—rival angels, a poor human happening to be driving through, or even the Winchesters in their loud, large car. Stupid.

                He doesn’t concern himself the threat Bartholomew sends out against him in particular. From his brethren, he expects this.

                Kevin walks in while Cas’s face is close to the screen, trying to figure out the best address to put in _A_ (he isn’t sure the bunker even _has_ an address—it can’t be secret if it’s on the map, can it?) so he can find the route to point _B_ in Mapquest.

                “What are you doing?” Kevin asks, suspicious. Cas freezes, face still inches from the laptop, and tries not to look too guilty.

                Kevin had gotten a text from Dean, warning him that Cas might be in an especially awful mood. It doesn’t really affect Kevin, seeing as these days Cas is hidden away in the basement, honing his small set of human powers, but Cas doesn’t look upset. Just wary, shoulders tense, now that Kevin’s interrupted him.

                “Oh, God,” Kevin says suddenly. Cas’s awkward, caught silence suddenly makes way too much sense. “It’s porn, isn’t it?”

                “Yes,” Cas answers, relieved to be found out. “It’s porn.”

                “So freakin’ gross, man,” Kevin complains, and stalks off toward the kitchen. Once he’s out of sight, Cas starts scribbling down the directions.

                When he hears Kevin turning on the television, exclaiming aloud when he finds a Star Trek marathon, Cas sneaks out silently through the front door.

                Walking down the deserted service road, he tries to place his thoughts in some semblance of an order. Provided that he can find a car to—borrow, a more polite word—within the next hour, he’ll still be about two hours behind the Winchesters. Too much time for them to reach Grandin, and immediately alert every angel in the vicinity—because, really, _everyone_ in the vicinity would be an angel—that they were there. Even if they did somehow blaze in unnoticed, he doesn’t know what they hope to accomplish by staring down a battle between two factions. The angels didn’t want peace, they wanted to fight their way back to Heaven. And they also wanted Cas.

                Kevin and Sam, they haven’t been able to find out a way to undo Metatron’s spell, give the angels their wish of returning to Heaven. So it’s good, then, that Cas has a backup plan if “everything goes to shit,” to quote Dean. He can give them the only other thing they want.

**

                The Winchesters had parked a few miles down the road, and after about ten minutes of surveying the town through binoculars, their worst hopes were confirmed.

                “It’s a Buddy Boyle clown show out there,” Dean says, watching the militant, watchful way that the child on the slide pauses to check the road before sliding down and climbing back up again; the storeowner at his fruit stand out front, endlessly arranging and rearranging his tumble of fruit, the hilt of an angel blade gleaming from his pocket.

                “Hmm,” Sam says. After another moment of quiet, he takes the binoculars down from his eyes. “It looks like there are guards around the grain factory on the edge of town. They’re all in factory uniform, but they’re not doing anything. Just waiting.”

                Dean trains his gaze in that direction. The factory is easily the biggest structure in the town with two huge silos and grain elevators galore. It makes sense—if they’re going to choose a small town, an area so tiny on the map that no one would notice its population being taken over, they still would need to choose a suitably grand arena for their angelic showdown. The factory works.

                “So that’s where we need to get in,” Dean says. “Ready?”

                They creep around the edge of town, trying to remain as deep as possible in the stubbled, shorn fields as they angle towards the factory. They have a little bit of cover—a fence and some scree that separate this field from the land closer to town—but it’s still delicate work. It takes almost half an hour, with their precautions, until they’re close enough to the factory that they’re in the shadow of a silo.

                It’s here that the smell gets pretty fucking bad, too. Sam wordlessly points to a burning mound about two hundred yards from them. Factory workers, tiny in the distance, are throwing what look like small scraps of something onto the flames.

                “If you’re not a suitable vessel for an angel, there’s not much left,” Sam says. His face creases in disgust as he turns away.

                With the guards on this side occupied with burning discarded vessels, it’s almost easy for Sam and Dean to find a break in the outer chain link fence,  sneak along the giant edge of the silo, hanging out of sight. Dean finds a piece of gravel on the ground and lobs it towards one of the angels on guard, who looks up, puzzled, and comes closer to investigate. Once he’s out of anyone’s sight, Sam hits the angel banishing sigil he’s completed on the silo wall. The angel opens his mouth for one split second of alarm before he’s whisked away.

                “You okay?” Dean says, nodding towards Sam’s bleeding arm. Sam nods. “Wish we could just gut the bastards,” Dean says, but Sam doesn’t reply to that one. They both know that Cas feels guilty enough that his brethren are on Earth; he wouldn’t want any more of them killed unless it was absolutely necessary. Even if this angel, and every one they’d come across, didn’t harbor the same peaceful feeling towards Cas himself.

                With the guard blown out to God knows where,  they’re able to shoulder in a side door, finding themselves in a massive room filled with jumbles of glinting machinery.

                Dean catches Sam’s eye and nods upwards. If some showdown is going on here, they want to be above it. That way, when they draw an angel banishing sigil up there, every last angel in the building, regardless of their faction, can be blown out of the water. Dean doesn’t care where to, just as long as it takes them a while to regroup and start murdering each other again.

                They skulk through the strange, dusty hulks of machinery, until they find a thin metal staircase, climbing up the wall. It’s only when Sam’s taken a few steps up it that he realizes he can’t hear the quiet sounds of Dean’s feet following behind him.

                He turns, and the butt of an angel blade slams down on his forehead.

**

                When Dean comes to, he comes to the unpleasant realization that there’s a circle of angels around him, staring down in displeasure, and he feels the bulk of Sam at his back, and there’s the sharp prick of a blade against his throat.

                “Hello, Dean Winchester,” says the man standing in front of him, although Dean’s still a little too groggy to see him clearly. He already hates the game-show, peppy voice the man’s using. “Funny seeing you here.”

                “Hilarious,” Dean groans. His fingers try to find Sam’s behind his back, and finally, thankfully, he finds Sam’s wrist—he can feel the thrum of a pulse there. Even if Sam does nothing to respond, that’s good enough.

                “I wasn’t expecting you,” the man continues, still in a delighted voice. “But this works out much better. Bartholomew, by the way.” He sticks out a hand for Dean to shake.

                Bartholomew has the smile of a shark, Dean decides. Way too many teeth seemed to be crammed in there, and there’s something to do with bloodlust in it. There’s still the bite of a blade right at his neck, but that’s not what keeps him from grabbing the man’s hand in return.

                “No?” Bartholomew says. He retracts his hand sunnily. “All right then, down to business we go.” His smiles abruptly evaporates. “I want Castiel.”

                He hears a slight intake of breath behind him—Sam is awake, then. He’s not sure if that will even make a difference, that Sam’s brain is up and whirring. They are royally screwed, here. “You can’t always get what you want,” Dean says.

                He’s expecting the fist to his face, but he didn’t think Bartholomew himself would do it. He doesn’t seem the kind to want to get his hands dirty. The impact knocks his face sideways, into the back of Sam’s head, and he can feel the dull throb where the ring on Bartholomew’s finger cut his cheek.

                “I always get what I want,” the angel says, quite literally. “And you might even leave here with your miserable life intact if you tell me where that traitor is.”

                “No idea,” Dean grits out. As Bartholomew raises his fist again, he says, desperately, “Don’t you have an angel genocide scheduled right now? Got some better enemies to stamp out?”

                The angels in the ring around them start laughing, which is probably the worst thing to come out of this whole clusterfuck so far. Bartholomew stands up and walks around Dean, who has to twist his head to follow.

                Another angel steps forward, coming to stand next to Bartholomew. “I think you mean me,” the angel says. He’s slender, older than Dean, with lank brown hair. “Malachi. And yes, I was planning on scrubbing Bartholomew and his followers from the factory walls today, but when I found out _you_ were here—well, we had a change of plans.”

                Quickly, before Dean’s shout of alarm can even make it out of his throat, Malachi darts forward and lifts Sam by his hair, twisting him around and pulling him away from Dean. The angel’s strength is enough that Sam can do nothing to stop it; he’s on his knees, dangling by his hair like a fish on a line. The distance between the brothers isn’t that much, five feet at most, but Dean’s veins feels like they’re made out of ice. With the familiar, steady press of Sam’s back against his, it almost felt like there was some way out of this.

                “You see, Dean,” Bartholomew says, “Nothing quite unites angels anymore like their hatred for Castiel. Even Malachi and I can get over our differences for a day, if it means we can kill the traitor together.”

                Malachi suddenly his a knife in his hand, glinting, and Sam barely gets a hold on his scream, clamping his lips together, as the angel drags the knife down his chest, leaving a ripped line of fabric and a thin gash of welling blood in its wake.

                “This is the way I’m going to kill your brother if you don’t tell me where Castiel is,” Malachi says. “I’m going to gut him like a pig, and you’ll have to watch. So let’s try this again: where’s Castiel?”

                Bartholomew laughs and claps Malachi on the shoulder, all buddy-buddy now.

                “Well?”

                Dean licks his lips, mind racing. There’s at least twenty angels in the room, all armed to the teeth, and he and Sam are both inches from being on the ends of their angel blades. But Cas is at the bunker, safe and protected, and he’s with Kevin and he’s at _home_ and the bunker needs to be protected at all costs. And so does Cas.

                Dean meets Sam’s gaze hopelessly. Sam nods, because Sam understands.

                “Time’s up.” Bartholomew’s face is suddenly disconcertingly close to Dean’s. “Do you have an answer, Dean?”

                The silence drags out, and Malachi says, “well, then,” and raises his angel blade, and Dean launches himself forward, feeling the blade tear into his throat and then clatter away, as he slams Bartholomew to the floor—

                For a second, the angel is stunned beneath him, and Dean does his best to land a few punches on that smug face, but then he’s being dragged away. Bartholomew’s laughing on the floor, blood on his lips, and Dean can’t think through the haze of pain, fists raining down on his body, beating him into submission, down into the factory floor—

                _Thank God Cas isn’t here_ he thinks hazily, even he hears Sam scream for him, even as all sound seems to white out. _Cas, thank God, Cas will be okay._

And that’s when he hears Cas’s voice.

**Reality Three: A Life Built in Four Walls**

                Sam didn’t know that Cas lived in Rexford, Idaho. He also didn’t know that he worked at a Gas-N-Sip and wore a blue vest and hadn’t been answering Dean’s phone calls these last few days. He doesn’t know any of this until Dean finally chooses to tell him on the drive there. Months ago, Dean had returned from the hunt Cas had tipped him off about and just shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something about Cas being okay, in response to Sam’s questions. Which was good, great even, but Sam still didn’t know why Cas insisted on staying away, ostensibly to protect _them_. Like the Winchesters weren’t used to the dangers they brought upon themselves.

                So Sam had demanded to know if Dean had asked Cas to come back, and Dean had said that Cas would soon, just not yet.

                For some strange reason, over the past week or so, Dean has been antsy. Sam hadn’t really known why, because there was nothing at the bunker to be worried about (he was fine, feeling better than he’d ever felt), and there wasn’t any news out of the ordinary from the angels or Abaddon. They were good.

                Finally, though, Dean had told him. He’d decided it was time to bring Cas home— _convince_ Cas to come home, Dean had hastily amended, because of course Cas had chosen to go, another choice chalked up to free will. But Dean hadn’t heard back from Cas, and finally he’d heard from Cas’s boss that Cas was gone, and no one knew where he was.

                Which is why Sam and Dean and the Impala are zooming towards Rexford, Idaho at six in the morning, while Dean tells him everything he knows.

                “A sale clerk?” Sam says. He’s trying to imagine it, the Cas who could burn out demons with the touch of his hand, restocking Snapples and counting out pennies.

                “He likes it,” Dean says. His voice is fond, and so is his smile, and he doesn’t seem to notice Sam’s sidelong look at  it. “He’s really good at it. He says it has a ‘human dignity.’”

                That makes Sam smile, if only because his love for humanity seems to be a holdover from his angelic days. Cas doesn’t care the might of heaven in his fingertips anymore, but he hasn’t changed much else besides.

                “Did his boss say if this is normal for him—to call off or leave without warning?”

                The smile slides from Dean’s face as he remembers the circumstances of their journey. “She didn’t  say. But I think Cas is pretty dedicated to that job. I don’t know what would make him just up and leave, and not bring his phone either—”

                Because without his phone, there was  no way to contact Cas. The prayer line was cut off forever, so the days of just being able to think _please, Cas, tell me you’re okay_ —those days were over. He hadn’t thought of this as a loss until Nora told him Cas was in the wind again.

                They arrive in Idaho the next afternoon. Sam shakes Dean awake, who was sleeping in the passenger seat, and Dean gives him directions to the Gas-N-Sip. They linger a moment in the parking lot after Sam takes the keys out of the ignition.

                “I’m sure he’s okay,” Sam says in a low voice. “No one would know to look for him here.”

                No, no one _should_. Cas had made sure to steer clear of Kansas after Dean had kicked him out without a reason given. But that doesn’t mean that no one would. The Rit Zien had happened upon Cas, hadn’t he?

                “No point waiting around,” Dean says suddenly. “Let’s go in and take a look around.”

                Inside the store, there’s a slight blonde woman operating the cash register, and Dean and her exchange looks of recognition when the door chimes him in.

                “Hi,” Dean says, approaching the counter. “I—my name’s Dean. I’m a friend of Steve’s.”

                “I remember you,” she says. “You visited Steve the same day as that disastrous date I had. You were all he’d talk about for the next few days—” She smiles. “He doesn’t talk very much, either. I’m Nora.” She sticks her hand out across the counter towards him.

                Dean doesn’t bother to tell her that he remembers—that it comes with the territory, remembering everyone’s names, even years later. “Dean,” he says, shaking her hand. “And that’s my brother Sam, he’s Steve’s friend, too.” Sam nods at her.

                “Has anything changed at all?” Sam says. “Has he called to—” He falters off, seeing Nora shaking her head.

                “Sorry,” she says. “I wish I had better news—I’m worried about him, too. I, well, I haven’t called the police yet,” she falters here, glancing between them, waiting for their anger. “I didn’t exactly hire him under the most _legal_ of conditions—he had no social security card, no driver’s license—but he said he’d fallen onto hard times, he asked me to _promise_ I’d never—”

                “Hey, Nora,” Sam says, coming over to put his hand gently on her arm. “It’s okay. We know you were just trying to help Steve out.”

                “You did the right thing,” Dean says, falling into rhythm with his brother. This kind of technique—comforting and questioning the witness as they strive for answers, is old hat. The only thing that’s different is their looking for Cas now.

                “You—you think so?” Nora says.

                “Of course,” Sam says. “Why don’t you show us where you found the phone, Nora.”

                Nora comes around the corner and leads them dutifully to the supply closet. It’s big enough to walk into, but it’s small and cramped—Sam could touch either wall with his arms spread out. Nora gestures to the second shelf.

                “The phone was sitting on the shelf there. I never saw it until it rang the other day when you were calling.”

                If Dean was hoping to find any evidence to explain Cas’s disappearance here, he was disappointed. The supply closet was neat and orderly, nothing out of place, and gave no hints as to why Cas had left it there.

                “This is exactly as you found it?” He asks Nora, gesturing around the small space.

                “Ye—” She stops, looking guilty.

                “What?” Sam says.

                “I’m not trying to come across like I mistreated Steve,” she says quickly. “You already know I hired him illegally. This is going to put me in a bad light, too, but I—I found out he was living here.”

                “Living where?” Dean says.

                “Right in here,” she says miserably. “It wasn’t until after he went missing, I swear. I’d found some of his stuff in here before but he always had an excuse and—oh, I feel awful. There was a sleeping bag and a phone charger and a toothbrush hidden in the corner.  I don’t think he had anywhere else to go.”

                Sam glances sideways at Dean, trying to ascertain if Dean himself was aware of this, but Dean wouldn’t meet his gaze.

                Had he known? Dean wonders. Maybe he had somehow, reading into Cas’s unwillingness to tell Dean where to go after Nora’s house, easily going along to Dean’s motel room with him. Maybe he was avoiding then what he hadn’t saved himself from now—the knowledge that Cas had no home to go to. That he curled up in a cramped, cold supply closet every night with nothing but a sleeping bag and a bunched-up shirt for a pillow. Dean thinks about the way Cas had slowly relaxed on his motel bed that night, eventually sinking into the mattress bonelessly,  like some shitty motel bed was the softest thing he’d ever felt.

                Dean can feel his heart still to race. He feels sick. Cas is gone, he might be dead, and it’s all his doing—he kicked Cas out, he didn’t lift a finger to help as Cas straggled across America to some bottom-rung Gas-N-Sip job, where he was poor and hungry and he didn’t even have a fucking _bed_ at night, where he slept on cement floor and Dean didn’t call him, and didn’t call him, and didn’t—

                The chime of the door can be heard now, faintly, in the supply closet they’re crowded in.

                “Excuse me,” Nora says, extricating herself from between the brothers. Dean’s still refusing to look at Sam, but they both hear the way Nora says, “ _Oh_ ,” her voice going funny. Their heads snap up, their hands immediately go to concealed weaponry.

                Dean skids out of the hallway, out into the store, and stops dead. Sam almost runs into him.

                Cas stands just inside the doorway, looking just as surprised to find Nora and the Winchesters waiting for him as they are to find him. His hair is fucked six ways to Sunday, he’s wearing worn jeans and a t-shirt that inexplicably says _’94 Super Bowl Champs_ ; his bicep is bandaged in an inexpert swathe of bandages, and his cheek has a scabbed-over cut and he’s _alive_ , he’s alive, Dean could throw up.

                “Hello,” Cas says. “I hope I didn’t worry anyone.”

**

                Cas looks chastened after he comes out of Nora’s office. The Winchesters are waiting for him.

                “She said I scared her half to death,” he says to them by way of greeting. “She also said next time I’m gone for five straight shifts without warning, I’ll be fired.”

                Dean cocks his head to the door, and the three of them exit together in silence. Once they reach the sidewalk, Dean rounds on him.

                “What the fuck were you thinking?” He demands. “Leaving—no _note_ , no warning; you didn’t even take your phone! I was w—what the hell happened to you out there?”

                Sam raises his eyebrows, because Dean sounds like a parent who just found their child sneaking in at three AM, but Dean isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at Cas with the special brand of murderous eyes he reserves for the people he loves so much, he wants to kill them.

                “I think what Dean means is that Nora wasn’t the only one who was worried,” Sam says quickly. “It’s good to see you, Cas, but you need to be careful. You know there’s plenty of angels, not to mention demons, who’d like to take a bite out of you.”

                “Something came up,” Cas says. He’s still looking a little goggle-eyed at Dean, surprised by the strength of his reaction. “I’m sorry that you came all this way for nothing.”

                “It’s not for nothing,” Dean says heatedly. Then, softer, “It’s not for nothing. Cas, we came to take you back to the bunker, for real this time.”

                He can’t say—not in front of Sam, who still doesn’t know about Ezekiel—what he really wants to. That he’s sorry for kicking him out, and that it won’t happen again, because the bunker is his home, too. He’ll have a place at the table and a bed of his own and however many pillows he wants to cushion his head at night. He hopes what he’s saying now can suffice.

                “Oh,” Cas says. His brow furrows. “Dean, that—that’s very generous of you. I’ll think on it.”

                There’s a surprised beat, Sam shifting on his feet.

                “Think on it?” Dean says. “Think on it? What’s there to decide? You’re coming with us.”

                ”Dean—”

                “A lot to think about, actually,” Cas says. His tone isn’t snide, but it is firm. His eyes meet Dean’s levelly. “I’ve been busy since I saw you last. I can’t leave right in the middle of this.”

                “Yeah? You win Employee of the Month or something?”

                “Dean.” This time it’s Cas saying his name like that, warning him. “I’ve actually been helping my brethren to find safe places to live. Many of them don’t want to become involved in the conflict, but they have nowhere to go. We’ve set up a bit of a network—finding angels who are homeless, or are unwilling and forced into fighting, and we try to find them jobs and a home.”

                “Cas, that’s awesome,” Sam says. “You should have told us that’s what you’re doing—we could have helped.”

                The look Cas gives him is confused. “I would have, but I thought working together would be too dangerous—”

                “Okay,” Dean breaks in. “Why were you missing for almost a week, then? And what happened to your face?”

                Cas’s hand jumps to his cheek, feeling over the scab like he forgot it was there. “Magdalena,” he says. “She was found out, very suddenly, by a leader of another faction. They were trying to press her into service again. I left as soon as I heard, to help get her away, but it took some—effort.”

                Dean’s hand goes to the clumsy bandage on Cas’s arm. “This, too?”

                Cas pulls his arm away. “I’m fine, Dean.”

                Dean just reaches out and runs his fingers under the edge of the material. “Shitty wrap job, whoever did it.”

                “ _I_ did it—”

                Sometimes Sam feels like he’s the oldest of the three of them. “Guys,” he says loudly. (“Let me just take a look at it—“ “I’m _fine_ , Dean—”) “Guys, can we focus?” He turns to Cas, who is pulling his arm out of Dean’s grasp with an irritated expression. “This work you’re doing, it can only be done here?”

                Cas hesitates. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s very new, and very unsteady. If the angel factions were to find any of us, they would kill us immediately. They don’t appreciate angels given the choice of whether to fight their battles or not.”

                Dean makes a face, because _of course_ Cas would somehow take it upon himself to find the deadly angel catnip job—

                “Besides,” Cas continues. “I have a job here—and I need it, because my brothers and sisters need money to survive in a human world, and I’m the one who’s giving it to them.”

                “There are jobs in Kansas,” Dean says in a low voice. There’s also a bunker, he doesn’t say. And a bedroom that isn’t a cold supply closet.

                “Fine,” Cas says, his eyes narrowing down. “I have a _life_ here. I have a job, and my friends, and I babysit for Nora on the weekends, I have regular customers and restaurants where I like to eat and—”

                “So, what? You’re just gonna stay here forever?” Dean says. He hadn’t even considered, driving out here, that if Cas was alive that he would want to stay. It hurts. “Because I can’t be doing this every weekend, Cas. Driving all over the map because you can’t answer your goddamned phone.”

                “I didn’t mean—”

                Dean steps closer, dropping his voice, like Sam’s not even there. “Come on, Cas,” he says. “The only way I’ll know if you’re safe—it’ll be if you’re with me.”

                Cas looks at him, clearly torn, and Sam, who’d been wondering whether he should be pretending not to listen, chooses to remind them of his presence again.

                “You don’t have to make up your mind right away,” Sam says. “You might not be able to come with us, but we can stay here for a few days.” He catches Dean’s expression and shrugs. “What? We’ve got our phones, I’ve got my laptop. Cas, us, we can all get our work done here.”

                (“I’ll actually _answer_ my phone, too—”)

                Cas smiles, a slow dawning look of comprehension. “I’m glad,” he says. “It will be so nice to have my friends here with me again.”

                Fuck, Dean does not deserve how happy Cas looks at the prospect of them being there, if even for only a few days. “You’ll be staying with us,” he says. “No more closets while we’re here, okay?”

                Cas cocks his head, confused as to how Dean knows that, and then his vision is filled up with Sam.

                “It’s good to see you, man,” Sam says, pulling him into a squeezing hug. In between the surprise of Cas being alive and fine, and Nora’s lecture, and immediately getting into it with Dean, there hadn’t been a chance for even that. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since Cas left the bunker all those months ago.

                Cas has learned the human requirements for a good hug. “You as well, Sam,” he says, and pats Sam a few times on the back.

                Dean scowls and edges his brother away, and clasps Cas’s wrist firmly, pulling his arm up to inspect his wound. “First things first, we need to get to the motel so I can check this out. I’m not being your Florence Nightingale in a week because you were stupid enough to get some infection—”

                “Dean,” Cas says. His eyes are fond when Dean looks up. “It’s nice to see you again.”

                Dean lets his fingers hold on for just a moment longer before he lets go.

 

**Reality One: The Only Job He’s Ever Known**

                Sam wasn’t sure why the angels had stopped their attack. He’d been busy screaming himself hoarse, trying to make out where Dean was in the tangle of angry, violent limbs, and then, one by one, they froze. Stood up in a creepy unit, like automatons, and turned to face some new threat, shoulder to shoulder.

                Sam, still being held by his hair, strained desperately to see. Was it yet another faction of angels, an invasion of demons—maybe, somehow, some hunters in the area had somehow heard of the strange happenings in Grandin, and come to investigate—

                It’s none of those. He watches, with rising dread, as Cas emerges from the shadows at the far end of the factory. The room is completely silent, the drawn-out suspension of collectively held breath, so Sam can hear the deliberate, heavy footfalls of Cas’s approach.

                Cas stops at the edge of the group. They all stare at each other for a moment—Bartholomew, Malachi, their followers, Sam. Dean doesn’t move on the floor (Sam realizes this is a far-off, horrified part of his mind), but mostly he can only stare at Cas, dumbly, silently. He doesn’t know how Cas got here, what he was _thinking_ by coming here—

                Bartholomew abruptly sits up from where he was still lying on the floor. He dabs his bloodied mouth on his jacket sleeve.

                “Castiel,” he says in greeting, giving his red shark’s smile.

                Castiel doesn’t say anything. Sam wonders if Cas has always looked that small, or if it’s the lack of grace that here, next to his brothers and sisters, makes him look so diminished. He inclines his head at Bartholomew’s greeting, but doesn’t say anything.

                Malachi’s hand tightens in Sam’s hair. “Grab him!”

                A few angels take a step forward, but Cas dances backward calmly, and that’s when he brings out an object from behind his back—his angel blade, its point wickedly gleaming.

                “You don’t think you can kill _all_ of us, do you, Castiel?” Bartholomew says. “Be reasonable.”

                “No,” Cas says. His voice is flat. “But I can kill myself.” And he brings the knife up to his throat, the sharp edge of it pressed brutally across the width of his neck, and waits.

                The effect of the angels laughing, echoing in the factory, is enough to raise goosebumps on Sam’s arms. He tries desperately to catch Cas’s eye, but Cas won’t even look at him. He’s just dispassionately looking over the whole scene—Dean, slumped on the floor, the laughing angels, the hand wound in Sam’s hair.

                “Castiel,” Malachi says in an impatient voice over Sam’s head. “You do realize that we want you dead, right? Go ahead, slit your throat. I’ll be glad to watch.”

                “Yes,” Cas says. “But I’d be denying you the pleasure. And—” He presses his blade harder to his own throat, in warning, as an angel shifts forward. “If you kill me, you’ll never know how to get back to Heaven.”

                There’s a brief, surprised pause.

                “You’re lying.”

                Cas doesn’t dignify that with a response.

                “You’re lying,” Bartholomew says again. His smile is gone. “If you knew how to get back to Heaven, you’d be there now.”

                “Would I?” Cas says. “Metatron had his reasons to put me on Earth.”

                The angels shift, uneasy, their gazes darting to their leaders. And Sam, Sam can only watch in rising dread. He just wants Cas to look at him, because he might know then what Cas is planning (is he stalling? Is someone else on the way?). But Cas won’t.

                Bartholomew turns to look at Malachi, and then stares over at Castiel. “Okay,” he says, all snake oil and charm. “What are you suggesting?”

                “A trade,” Cas says evenly. “Me for them.”

                “Cas, _no_ —” Sam says, before a fist to the stomach, where his skin is split open, makes him cut off, wheezing.

                Cas continues on like there was no interruption. “Give me your word that they’ll go free, and I’ll give myself over to you willingly. If not, I’ll kill myself, and you’ll never find out whether I’m lying about knowing how to get back into Heaven.”

                “Bartholomew, don’t listen to him,” Malachi says sharply. “It would be a mistake to not take care of the Winchesters while we have a chance.”

                “Take care of them?” Bartholomew says idly, prodding Dean with his foot. “I’d say this one is as good as done for. I don’t think the Winchesters are going to be much of a problem for us.”

                “But—”

                “And if they do, we have no reason to worry,” Bartholomew continues. “If today has shown us anything, it’s that it would be almost too easy to kill them in the future.”

                Sam isn’t listening to the negotiations between the two rivals. His eyes are blurry, his hair feels like it’s being pulled out by his roots. He can still see the limp, bloodied form of Dean at Bartholomew’s feet. And Cas, who seems almost bored by these proceedings, still won’t look at him. Sam is screaming inside his head, praying desperately for Cas to do something different, _save himself_ , dammit, but Cas can’t hear his prayers anymore. Cas is just human, now.

                “—Fine, then,” Malachi says. “I’ll go first, then. I have ways to make him talk.”

                “Splendid,” Bartholomew says. “You hear that, Castiel? We’ve got a deal. You can drop the blade now.”

                “No,” Cas says, completely unfazed by their decision. “Let them leave.  I’ll hand myself over as soon as I see they’re safe.”

                Bartholomew’s face twists in annoyance, but he waves his hand imperiously over at Malachi. “You heard him.”

                The hand in his hair abruptly releases Sam, and he slumps to the ground. Feeling the eyes of every angel in the room on him, he pauses a moment, vision swimming.

                “Cas,” he gasps out.

                “Sam,” Cas responds. He sounds impatient. “Get Dean out of here now. He needs help.”

                “But—”

                Cas’s eyes finally meet his. There’s a bright light wavering across his face, the glint from the blade he’s still holding to his neck. He shakes his head wordlessly, and tilts his head towards Dean on the floor. “Please,” is all he says. It’s all he will say, the only ammunition he’ll give in front of his unforgiving crowd. But Sam can recognize a last request when he sees it.

                Still under the scrutiny of the angels, he scrambles over to Dean. He looks even worse up close, blood running down his cheek,  an eye swelled closed, a split lip. He doesn’t make a sound as Sam struggles to push an arm around his shoulders, heaving him up.

                Finally, Sam has Dean hoisted up, an arm looped tight around his neck, his toes dragging on the ground. Dean groans, his head lolling sideways.

                Sam takes a step forward, and then another. His whole body burns, and Dean is a dead weight at his side, and it will be a long journey—out the factory, through the fields, back to the Impala.

                The angels start closing ranks around them, leaving a small opening for Sam and Dean to pass through. It’s not near Cas. Sam stares helplessly at him, trying to remain as stone-faced as Cas and failing. He nods at him, beyond words, hoping that everything he means to say— _thank you_ and _I swear Dean will be all right_ and _brother, I love you_ are all apparent on his face.

                Cas’s eyes burn into him, bleak and dry. “Goodbye, Sam,” he says.

                Sam can feel the watchful gazes behind him as he staggers away, making his shoulders tense up, aware of his defenselessness. Nothing happens. His breath catches, harsh in his throat, tears dripping down his nose.

                “Come on Dean,” he mutters, his clammy hand slipping on Dean’s. “Almost there.”

                He rounds a corner, another one, the drag of his feet echoing in the aisles. He finds the door where they came in, and shoulders it open, hauling Dean after him.

                Still through the fields, down the road to the Impala. “Almost there, Dean,” he gasps. He doesn’t know how long the angels will stay their mercy. “Almost there.”

                Somewhere far behind him, he hears the metallic sound of surrender, of an angel blade clattering to the floor.

 

**Reality Two: The Wretched Man**

He hasn’t talked to Dean since he found himself tied to a chair, with no recollection of how he got there, and Dean’s pale, miserable face looming suddenly over him, asking if he was okay.

                All those revelations, one after another. Dean can’t seem to help himself. Sam, you’ve been possessed by angel. I let him.  Sam, it wasn’t the angel I thought it was. Sam, the angel inside you killed Kevin.

                He still stands by the belief that he was right to leave. He wants to shout at Dean, he wants to strike him, he wants to demand—how could you do that to me? How could you take that choice away from me?

                He can’t be around his brother. They text, sporadically, but only dealing with the bare bones. A lead on Abaddon, a recent spate of murders that in all probability was probably angel warfare. Their texts are concise and to the point, brooking no room for advances or retreats. Someday, they might battle through their problems. Not now.

                The apartment Sam lives in is small, shabby, and the first time he’s really been alone since Dean was in Purgatory. Even then, though, Sam wasn’t completely alone—soon enough, he was caught up with Amelia. He thinks he needs this loneliness, especially after Dean’s betrayal and Kevin’s death and the fact that he wasn’t alone in his body, not really, until very recently. At some point this loneliness might become cathartic, as he wants it to be, but it hasn’t entirely worked out. He wakes up sometimes feeling like his hand is slightly smoldering, and sees a flash of burned-out eyes. He’s done terrible things, even if he wasn’t aware of them at the time.

                He wakes up one night to his cell phone ringing on the night stand. It’s Dean.

                He debates not answering for a moment, but with their current relationship, he doesn’t think Dean would call unless it was the end of the world.

                “What?”

                “Sam?” Dean’s voice is wrecked. Sam wonders if he’s been drinking. “I need your help.”

                “You can’t expect—”

                “It’s Cas.”

**

                It’s almost unfair. Dean must know that out of all the things Sam feels guilty about, one of them is Cas. Even if it wasn’t him, but Gadreel, who made Cas leave—but still, it was because of him. It was one to worry about Cas abstractly, wondering why he’d left so suddenly, but he still hadn’t been that worried. If Cas had left of his own volition, he had to know some way to take care of himself, had to have had some plan.

                Finding out it was just the opposite had been awful. Finding out that since then, Cas has fallen off the map, that Charlie had had to track him down, that Cas was willfully enjoying his demise—that was worse.

                He reminded Dean, as he climbed into the Impala with him, that he was doing this _only_ for Cas. He owes nothing to Dean, he’s just correcting a wrong that was done to his friend. Dean just nods, looking tired.

                “Just like old times, huh?” Dean says, as he cranks the key in the ignition. The words are too overdone, jokey, and Sam doesn’t respond. They lapse into silence.

                “An addict,” Sam says flatly, later. “I can’t believe—Cas.”

                Dean’s profile is grim, his jaw tight. “Yeah,” he says. “It was almost too easy.”

                Sam doesn’t know if it makes him feel better, or worse, that Dean considers himself so complicit for Cas’s condition. As guilty as Sam feels, he rationally knows that it wasn’t _him_ that sent Cas away. It was the angel possessing him, using Sam’s voice and the threat on Sam’s life to make sure he got his way. Even so, he doesn’t want to share that burden with Dean. They’re not— _together._ He doesn’t want some feeling of companionship, of similar obligation, with his brother. There is no reason to bond over their joint hand in Cas’s circumstances.

                They don’t talk much on the way there. Sam tries to avoid the pull of nostalgia—from the songs that Dean plays, and has always played. From the familiar passenger seat and his elbow on the window ledge. The only thing that’s changed, really, is him. And Dean.

                Dean, he knows—and _no_ , he doesn’t feel guilty—thrives on what he loves. What he does love, he loves fiercely. Family, of course, and especially Sam. He has to wonder if the dark shadows under his  eyes, the ragged stubble of a beard, has to do with him. Dean has always done everything for Sam out of love, and that’s what got them in this mess in the first place.

                Later, silently eating at a diner, Sam reflects that surely Dean’s melancholy isn’t _all_ to do him with him. Because if Dean loved anything else in the world, it would be a former angel named Castiel. Even if he’d never admit it to Sam. Even if he’d never admit it to _Cas_.

                “I’m guessing Cas wasn’t happy to see you when you visited,” he says slowly.

                Dean snorts down into his uneaten plate of fries. “No,” he says. “Not very.”

                He rubs at his forearm, an unconscious gesture that seems like it’s habit, although Sam’s never seen Dean do that before. He gestures with his fork at the red, upraised welt that he sees peeking from beneath Dean’s sleeve.

                “What happened?”

                Dean, suddenly alert, pulls his sleeve down. “Nothing,” he says quickly.

                Sam is not doing this for his brother, so he keeps himself from pressing the issue.

                Sometime later in the day, Sam looks out the window and watches the streets grow steadily more decrepit.

                “Almost there,” Dean says tersely. He finally pulls over to the side of the road, looking up through the windshield at an apartment building a few houses down.

                “I think—” He says, and stops. “He was squatting there when I was here a few days ago. Unless they’ve been cleared out, he should still be there.” He tells Sam which door on the second floor he should be looking for, and if the room’s empty, ask around for “Cas.”

                “He’s using his real name?” For some reason, that’s what really surprises Sam. “But that makes it so easy for angels—”

                “Yep,” Dean says shortly. He meets Sam’s eye for a moment, looking frustrated. “He won’t see  me, so—it’s all you, I guess. Think you can handle it?”

                Can Sam _handle it_. He opens the door and stalks off, folding his arms against the cold.

                The building is dank and dreary and smells disgusting. Sam gets a few curious, suspicious looks, but with the foreknowledge of where to find Cas, he’s able to walk through the halls with purpose. He steps over someone’s legs that are sprawled across the floor, ignores a door creaking open to stare at him through a small sliver.

                It all seems ridiculous, unrealistic, because the serious, earnest Cas that he’s known for years wouldn’t live somewhere like this. He might try to help the people in these kinds of situations, because Cas has a limitless love for humanity. He knocks on the door Dean told him to, still feeling the strange sensation of disconnect. There has never been the slightest hint, in all these years of knowing Cas, that he would become the kind of person to disappear through the cracks like this.

                And then a horribly familiar face opens the door. There’s the faint, stale scent of an unwashed body that accompanies swinging the door open, and Cas’s face is mildly curious until recognition sharpens his features.

                “Oh,” he says, jutting a hip against the door. “I should have known Dean would send his faithful dog here.  Hello, Sam.”

                “H-hi, Cas,” Sam says. It’s worse, seeing it rather than hearing Dean’s pained explanations from that night on the phone. Cas does not look like an angel, or even the friend Sam’s used to. He’s unshaven and thin, and he tries to act like he’s not staring at Cas’s abused arms.   

                Cas notices anyways, smiling in delight. “Have you come to save me, Sam? That’s kind of you, but you’ll get the same answer that Dean did.”

                Sam remembers his mission, pulling himself together. “I’m just here to visit,” Sam says. “Cas, let’s talk. Please.” For a moment the self-aware smirk on Cas’s face drops. He glances back into his room, and after a moment opens his door a little wider.

                “You were always kind, Sam,” he says, and then steps away to let Sam into the room.

                Cas walks away to the window, stepping across his mattress uncaringly. He even walks differently, Sam thinks. There’s a shameless, almost sexual sway to his hips. It makes Sam think that the vessel Cas once wore indifferently, clothing his grace like a paper bag, has a different value to Cas now—meant to be used as a tool, to get attention, although the treatment of his now-human body remains just as careless. While Cas rummages, Sam looks around the small room. There’s no one else in there. Good.

                “Hope you don’t mind,” Cas says, his back to Sam while he strikes a match. At first Sam thinks he’s talking about…well, about whatever it is he’s tapping out the window; Sam can’t pretend to know, was so incredibly straight-laced that he has the dubious honor of only ever getting addicted to the rare commodity that is demon blood. But Cas continues on: “We’re gonna have to cut this meeting short. Still have my day job.”

                He turns, casting a quick smile at Sam, who’s suddenly very glad that Dean, miserable as he is about this whole situation, isn’t here to hear this.

                “It’s okay,” Sam says, and then very deliberately closes the door behind him, and turns the lock.

                Cas freezes at the window, his shoulders up around his ears, and then he turns around and gives Sam a forced smile.

                “So no easing into it, then.”

                “I’m sorry, Cas,” Sam says. “We have to get you out of here, man.”

                He takes a step forward, and Cas immediately mirrors it with another step back. “’We?’ You don’t have to do whatever Dean tells you, you know,” Cas spits out. “Make some decisions for yourself.”

                “Cas,” Sam says softly, taking another step forward. He looks at the poor imitation of the friend who once pulled the Winchesters from Hell. “I am.”

                Cas backs into the wall, and then, in the split second where Sam thinks he might _come quietly_ , he sees Cas open his mouth and intake a breath for a scream—

                He’s across the room, quick as a snake, to push his hand over Cas’s mouth—the scream bursts out for a knife-thin second before it’s smothered.

                Cas stares up at him with wide eyes, his breaths hot against Sam’s hand, as he tries to twist away. With an efficiency that ashames himself, Sam knocks Cas’s head against the wall, quick and sharp and just hard enough to force him out.

                Cas crumples into a pile of limbs, all that stubbornness and bitterness snuffed away in a second. Sam catches him under the arms, easily hoisting him up.

                “Hey, hey,” Sam says, even though Cas can’t hear him. “Everything’s gonna be okay soon.”

                He looks around Cas’s decrepit room, wondering if there’s anything worth bringing, but decides against it. He’s not sure there’s any souvenir he can bring from here that would be worth remembering.

                Sam fumbles the phone from his pocket and presses the first number on his speed dial.

                “Hey,” he says breathlessly, when he hears Dean pick up. “Pull up front. I’ve got him.”

                Dean gruffs out a terse reply and hangs up.

                Sam picks up his unconscious friend, unlocks the door, and leaves that squalid, cheerless place. There are plenty of people to witness him doing it, but no one says anything, or makes a move to stop him. Somehow, he had figured that would happen. If Cas had any friends in this place, they let him go with remarkable ease.

 

**Reality One: The Traitor**

                The first thing he hears is his brother’s voice, saying his name. It’s remarkably effective, because Dean knows, everyone knows, that he would fight his way through the veil, give a finger to death itself, if his brother needs him.

                Sam’s face swims into view above him. His hair is greasy, his eyes red-rimmed, and he gasps out a broken sound, a relieved sigh, when Dean blinks his eyes open.  

                “Thank _God_ ,” he says.

                Later, Dean will remember a few things with startling clarity. Like the motel room, and his slanted view of it from his head on the pillow. It was dim, curtains drawn, and over the hump of his feet he could see a mess of supplies on the television stand—pill bottles, rolls of bandages, a dirty bowl of water. (“Angels,” Sam told him. “They had angels in the nearest hospital; they recognized us. I couldn’t risk it— had to do it all myself.”)

                “The _factory_ ,” Dean rasps out. And then, with horror, “ _Cas.”_

He remembers looking up at Sam, waiting for him to soothe, to explain, to tell him how the Hell these three lucky bastards got the hell out of Dodge this time.

                Instead, Sam’s face crumples. Dean can’t remember the last time Sam looked so— _young_. “I couldn’t,” Sam said. “I didn’t know if you were gonna _live_ —I couldn’t leave your side, you were running a fever—Dean, _I promised_ him—”

                (Later, when they found a hunter-friendly doctor, he told Dean he rightfully should have gone to the ER. Concussion, coughing up blood, broken ribs—the whole works. Dean didn’t especially care.)

                “We have to go there. We have to go there _now_.”

                Sam standing up, holding out his hands, almost as if warding Dean off. “You only just woke up,” Sam says. “You can’t—”

                “ _Sammy.”_

He doesn’t remember the leaving so much, or the drive there. He knows Sam must have bandaged his ribs so he could even walk upright, he knows he must have been awash in pain. He knows the drive there must have taken some time, but he doesn’t remember it. Only remembers the single-minded thought that pushed through everything else, even blotting out the pain— _Cas._

Grandin is deserted. (Sam tells him that later, although Dean doesn’t notice. There could have been a whole army of angels waiting for them, and Dean would have only spared them the attention that it took to slaughter them, carving a path in the blood it took to get to Cas. So Sam keeps those memories to himself: the eeriness of the deserted town, the rotting fruit outside the grocery store, the still-smoldering pile outside the factory.)

                Grandin is deserted, so they find their way into the factory remarkably fast.

                Sam has the common sense to take out his angel blade, and Dean remembers that—the glint of the blade skimming in out and out of the light from the high windows, quick as a fish, but the factory is empty, empty, the twists and turns around the large machinery so confusing, and he can’t find where it happened, where it all went to shit—

                He remembers Sam giving this strange, punched-out breath, and when he turns he sees Sam pointing to a door hanging ajar in the wall.

                Dean throws caution to the wind. “Cas!” He screams. He remembers running sideways into the door, bruising his shoulder against it, and Sam toppling through right behind him—

                They’re in the silo. The air is cool, the space is huge and hollow, and in the half-dark they can make out some shape against the far wall, gray and unmoving.

                (He remembers Sam’s fingers closing tight, like a vise, around his arm. “Don’t,” Sam says. “Please, let me—” But he also remembers ripping his arm away).

                More so than anything, he remembers what it felt like when he stepped through the gloom and saw the shape for what it was. It was like a steel door dropping down on his chest, it was like falling through air and colliding into a wall of ice. Cold. Hard. Unforgiving.

                “Cas,” he croaks out. “No, no—”

                They left Cas there when they were done with him. Leaned up against the wall of the silo, that poor broken body that had served him so well. No quick and easy death, not for him—Sam could tell, because his eyes weren’t burnt out. They remained blank, resigned, staring towards Heaven.

                “Cas,” Dean says. He takes Cas’s cold face in his hands, cradling it, willing life into it. “Please, Cas, come on.”

                He remembers the smell of old blood, and _TRAITOR_ , carved without forgiveness into flesh. He remembers Sam’s touch falling heavily on his shoulder, like a brand.

                He remembers pleading, begging, praying— and how it didn’t change a single goddamned thing.

 

**Reality Three: The Dreamer**

Cas takes a shower at the motel while Dean and Sam have a brief conference.

                “Don’t know why he has to be so stubborn,” Dean says. “I could be at the bunker in my own bed now, instead of crammed into this small room with the two of you.”

                “Actually,” Sam says mildly, “We wouldn’t have made it back to the bunker yet. We’d still be at some motel for the night.”

                “Yeah, well,” Dean says. “Mister Angel Philanthropist put a kibosh in that idea, so there’s that.”

                Sam shrugs and turns back to his laptop. He, personally, is enjoying himself. Cas is back, there’s no immediate killing to be doing, and he’s feeling healthier than he has in ages. He knows Dean feels the need to pretend otherwise, for appearances sake—but he doesn’t especially feel the need to encourage it.

                Cas exits the bathroom a few minutes later, wearing boxers and a t-shirt that he borrowed from Dean. Dean pretends that Cas wearing his clothes is perfectly normal, nothing to get excited about, as he beckons Cas imperiously over to the bed and gets to work _correctly_ bandaging his arm.

                “What’s that you’re putting on my arm?”

                “Jesus, you’ve never heard of _Neosporin_?”

                Sam falls asleep to the sound of them bickering.              

                About twenty minutes later, Dean snugly wraps the bandage around Cas’s bicep one last time, and secures it. He lets Cas look over his handiwork while he changes for bed and brushes his teeth. When he comes out, he looks between his bed—the one with Sam spread in all four directions on it—and the other, where Cas is sitting on the edge of the bed, plugging his cell phone in. Dean knows he’s doing that in case any angels call with an emergency, needing help.

                “Hey, scoot over,” he says. “Apparently I’m bunking with you tonight.”

                Cas edges over, looking perfectly unperturbed about it, but Dean’s thinking about the last time they saw each other, and he thinks Cas is, too.

                Dean reaches over and clicks off the lamp. After a few seconds, shapes and shades come back to him, showing him the gray curve of Cas’s cheek in the darkness. Cas is on his back, breathing deep and content, and close enough to touch.

                “Cas,” Dean says. He voices the thing that’s been bothering him since he found out that Cas sleeps on a supply closet floor, since he found out he’s been giving all his money away, since he found out that Cas doesn’t want to return to the bunker with the Winchesters anymore. “Are you happy here?”

                “Of course,” Cas says. For some reason, Dean seems disappointed by this answer.

                “Oh,” he says. “Okay.”

                Cas feels the need to tread carefully. “Sometimes I have to look hard for something to be happy about,” he admits. “But tonight, I’m happy being here.” The _with you_ is unspoken, but Dean hears it all the same.

                Sometime in the night, Cas rolls on his stomach across the mattress and finds himself facing in the direction of the window. There’s a small sliver of night sky peeking through a gap in the curtain—all that is familiar and known to Cas, a home that’s been carved out of time and blood and family and God’s love. The stars he can see there are as recognizable as the face he has come to know as his own in mirror.

                Tonight, he turns his eyes away from Heaven. Instead, he turns to the other side, to the warm bulk snoring on the bed next to him, to Dean.

**Author's Note:**

> Boo. Hiss!
> 
> 1) I am sorry for my long delay. I was a bridesmaid in my sister's most DIY-ever wedding last weekend, and am still recovering. Beautiful ceremony, LONG week beforehand.  
> 2) I somehow deleted my almost-finished Chapter 9 of Everytown, USA (highlight of awful laptop shenanigans) which leads to...  
> 3) Writing this instead of finishing the aforesaid chapter. Should be finished by tomorrow or Monday! Apologies...  
> 4) Thanks to all my lovely readers and commenters. Should I change my name to "angst"rose?  
> 5) Temporary. TEMPORARY!! 
> 
> Next chapter:  
> Reality One: the Winchesters deal with the aftermath, two surprise guests.  
> Reality Two: Cas isn't the only one fighting an addiction, and Linda Tran has an idea as to how to wield the Mark of Cain.  
> Reality Three: It's a problem that Cas and Sam are so buddy-buddy, Abaddon has big plans. 
> 
> Got a tumblr a few weeks ago! paperclothesline.tumblr.com. Let's be fun blogging buddies :)


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